


Other People's Lives

by primetime



Category: Supernatural
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2011-02-02
Updated: 2011-02-02
Packaged: 2017-10-15 07:39:24
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,720
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/158566
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/primetime/pseuds/primetime
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Jo lost her virginity when she was fifteen, back against the wall outside the roadhouse, legs spread as far as they would go despite the tight confines of her jeans around her ankles.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Other People's Lives

Jo lost her virginity when she was fifteen, back against the wall outside the roadhouse, legs spread as far as they would go despite the tight confines of her jeans around her ankles. She had gone out for a smoke, trying to escape her mom's watchful eyes, and found one of her dad's old friends passed out, hand still on the Glock at his side.

Jo had watched him sleep for a long moment, breathing out smoke in firm puffs and watching it drift away on the first breeze that'd been around all summer. She had stubbed out the cigarette on the bricks behind him and touched his shoulder. When he had just moaned and curled into closer, she stood up and kicked less gently at his side. He had almost toppled over, only picking himself up after a moment.

"Jo," he had said, looking up at her. "Jo."

"Yep," she'd said. "Let's get you out of here before Mom catches you sleeping it off." She had hoisted him up, her shoulder under his damp armpit, and he'd stumbled, grabbing at her other shoulder for balance- then sliding his hand up to tangle his fingers in her hair.

"You grew up gorgeous, girl," he had said. "Just- just gorgeous."

She had stepped back, weighing his sincerity. "Thanks," she'd said, and then unbuckled her belt.

"Hey," he'd said, "Jo, baby- what are you doing?"

"C'mon," Jo unbuttoned the top button of her jeans, pulled them apart so that the zipper slid down.

He'd stepped closer, smelling like whiskey and gunpowder and the cigarette she'd been smoking."I don't think-"

"Don't make me beg," she'd said, firmly. "Don't you make me beg for this."

He'd hurried away fifteen minutes later, and Jo had smoked the rest of the pack with her jeans still gaping open. He hadn't come back to the roadhouse until six months later, and when he did he hadn't met her eyes.

*

Sometimes Jo thinks if one more man brushes her off as just a silly little girl, she'll scream. Or whip out the shotgun she's kept in her truck since she was fourteen and just start embedding shells in anything nearby- walls, tables, drunken assholes who laugh her off when she tosses back shots at twice their speed.

Her daddy had used a Beretta, a nine-millimeter standard with a ten-round magazine. Jo found it under her mother's bed just a few months after her dad had died, had it on her lap when her mother had found her. Mom had yanked it from her hands, just the wrong side of violently, and shoved Jo out of the room. Jo hadn't even known enough to put two and two together- didn't even figure out that it had been her dad's until years later.

Jo had found it again when she was fourteen and claimed it for her own. Took it out to Jim Handler's property up the mountain, jammed her fingers into every crevice until she could pry it apart and put it back together in minutes. It's a miracle she hadn't broken it.

She'd worn long-sleeved shirts all summer to hide the bruises she'd given herself, learning to handle the recoil.

Jimmy Handler had found her shooting at trees with shoplifted bullets, had stood behind her with one hand on her waist and the other steadying her arm. He was only in his mid-twenties, a transplant from Colorado who'd settled down out not far from the roadhouse a few years back.

He had worked with her all summer, setting up new targets, correcting her stance, bringing her in for a beer when the heat got too bad. Jo had laughed in his kitchen, watching his yellow curtains flutter, and when she'd finally bulls-eyed a target three times in a row, she'd turned around and kissed him, painfully awkward and quick on his grinning mouth as he'd tried to congratulate her.

He'd kissed open her mouth, just for a minute, bending her back, just a little too far for her to stand comfortably. Backed up against a fence post, he started unbuttoning her shirt, revealing her white cotton bra, the cross her dad had left for her. And then he'd pushed her away, wiped off his lips with the back of his hand and looked at her with genuine horror.

"You're fourteen," he'd spit out, disgust wavering in his voice- and as much as Jo tells herself it was directed at himself, that he can't take her seriously, she doesn't believe it.

Two months later, she'd fucked a hunter outside the back wall of the roadhouse. It didn't make her feel better.

*

The kids at her high school don't like Jo.

She's pretty much known them all since she was out of diapers- there isn't really a lot of turnover in a hick town like this, and so you get to know everybody quick.

They tolerate her- nobody bullies her or makes fun of her, even. They're just sort of wary. Jo does her work, doesn't sass her teachers, tries to make small talk every once in a while.

There's one girl, Jo-Anne, short and mousy with long, brown hair. Until the fourth grade, they'd been best friends- thrown together automatically by the fact that they shared a name. Jo used to go to over to Jo-Anne's house and they would run around her backyard, playing with her dog, the friendliest half-dead German Shepherd mix Jo's ever met. It used to lick her fingers, and then they'd eat homemade popsicles made out of fruit juice from a can.

Then Jo's dad had died, and Jo had watched in the mirror as her face had frozen over, and now Jo-Anne eats lunch with the other kids while Jo goes out and sits on the front steps, kicking her legs against the stone.

*

Jo doesn't start fighting with her mom until she's about sixteen. That's long enough for the memory of her mother's face at her dad's funeral to go away, for the sense that it's the two of them against a fucking crazy world to fade.

But once they start they can't goddamn stop. Jo's watched her mother butt heads against enough drunken assholes to know that she doesn't back down if she thinks she knows what's best.

Mom used to cut her hair when she was a kid, measuring it out slow and easy in front of their only mirror, trimming it and then sweeping all the hair off the front steps. Everybody Jo knows in town had their mom do the same- the boys with bowl-cuts and the girls with whatever their moms could fix up. Some came in with pretty uneven edges, but nobody really had the cash to spend on things you could do yourself with a pair of scissors.

When she's sixteen, Jo steals her mother's pair out of the kitchen and chops off her hair to her chin, longer and haphazard in the back. Her mom takes it in stride, laughing it off, tells Jo if she wants to look like a boy she's gonna have to do something about her chest first. Jo wants to scream a little, doesn't know why, just wants someone on earth to talk to her straight.

*

Jo never figures out how Sam- well, the demon inside Sam- had found her. She'd ask Sam, but, you know, they didn't really part on good terms. She'd just patched Dean up and let him wander out the door, aiming for his brother, and that had been the end of that.

It shouldn't surprise her, but it does- it grates, the way Dean brushed her off. Jo doesn't stick around that bar long, heads for a job in Massachusetts, instead, looking for someplace new to wipe away the memory of Dean's back, turned to her, leaving her behind for the real fight.

She gets a long scar up her side in Massachusetts, and breaks her ankle in fucking New Jersey, and is all the way to Alabama when Bobby calls her, to tell her Sam's dead.

Jo's sitting on the roof of her truck when he calls, having a beer and drinking in some sunshine. Bobby begs her to come, tells her he can't get through to Dean, that he knows they're friends. She thinks about the way Dean used to touch his brother, casual, like it was no big deal to punch him in the arm and wrestle him for the paper and rest a hand on the slope of Sam's neck, and then she knows she'll go.

By the time she gets there, Bobby's gone and even from the doorway, the cabin smells like whiskey. She creeps in, tentative, and finds Dean in the back, sitting- fuck, sitting next to Sam's body.

She can't pretend it's not creepy, that it doesn't shock the breath out of her to see Sam lying there, looking blue and cold and stone-dead.

"Dean," Jo says, tearing her eyes away from the body to rest them on Dean's back, hunched over in the only chair. It looks like it'll buckle under his weight any second now, a pathetic thing made out of scraps of wood.

"There's nothing you can do," Dean says, not looking back at her, running a hand over his face, probably red-rimmed eyes. "Just- get the fuck out, Jo," and she'd be pissed at the cuss word but he's sounding too bone-deep exhausted for her to be angry.

"C'mon," she says, and lays a hand on his shoulder.

"Get OFF," Dean says, and his calm and measured voice gives way to a furious yell. He stands up, knocking her hand off and the chair aside.

"You think you can make me better? You think you can fix me, Jo?"

She wills herself to stand strong even as she starts backing up instinctively, looking at the curl of his lip and the vicious angle of his face.

"Get the fuck out," Dean says, and she goes.

 

*

"I can help," Jo says, looking straight on at Sam. "I can."

It took a week for the news of his brother's death to reach her, three more weeks to track him down. Her hands are sweating.

Sam measures her up for a long second, silent, then leans over and unlocks the side door. Jo gets in.


End file.
